Eva Mackey

Eva Mackey completed an Honours BA in Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and Spanish at the University of Toronto in 1989 as a mature student. She then went to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship to study social anthropology at the University of Sussex. She received an MA in 1990 and a D.Phil in 1996. Her MA thesis examined the conflict about the “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1999. Her doctoral thesis examined cultural pluralism and national identity in Canada. After completing her doctorate, she took up a postdoctoral fellowship in Australia, studying the rise of the new right and conflict over aboriginal rights. She then had a post-doctoral fellowship in the York University Department of Sociology. She became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University in 2001, and acted as the Graduate Director for several years until coming to Carleton in 2007.

Eva has published two books and numerous book chapters and journal articles on issues concerning nationalism, identity, whiteness, multiculturalism, cultural politics, and Indigenous land rights in Canada and Australia.

Research Interests

My research and teaching interests include the politics of culture, identity, nation, race, rights, representation and history within the context of colonial /national/ global processes. My key research questions concern the limits and possibilities of modernity, liberalism and settler colonialism regarding cultural difference and governance. Specific projects have examined multiculturalism, national identity and the politics of culture in Canada; contests about race and representation in Canada; and Aboriginal rights “backlash” and decolonization in settler nations.

Mackey, Eva. 2007. “’Death by Landscape:’ Race, Nature and Gender in Canadian Nationalist mythology”. In Eugenia Sojka (ed) (De)Constructing Canadianness: Myth of the Nation and its Discontents Wydawa Publishers, Poland. Originally published in Canadian Women’s Studies Volume 20, Number 2. Summer 2000: 125-130.

Mackey, Eva. 2002 Review of The dark side of the nation: essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and gender (Himani Bannerji), and Multiculturalism and the history of Canadian diversity (Richard Day) American Ethnologist Volume 29, Number 2: 475-77

2011. BRCSS Distinguished Visiting Scholar – Massey University New Zealand (BRCSS, the Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences Network):

2010. International Council for Canadian Studies (ICCS) International Research Linkages Grant: Title: “Living Together Differently: Indigene-Settler-Migrant Relations in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand”. With Dr. Avril Bell, Massey University, New Zealand